This study, first published in 2000, examines the impact of nationalist political thought on the modern novel.

In Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, first published in 2000, Pericles Lewis shows how political debates over the sources and nature of 'national character' prompted radical experiments in narrative form amongst modernist writers. Though critics have accused the modern novel of shunning the external world, Lewis suggests that, far from abandoning nineteenth-century realists' concern with politics, the modernists used this emphasis on individual consciousness to address the distinctively political ways in which the modern nation-state shapes the psyche of its subjects. Tracing this theme through Joyce, Proust and Conrad, amongst others, Lewis claims that modern novelists gave life to a whole generation of narrators who forged new social realities in their own images. Their literary techniques - multiple narrators, transcriptions of consciousness, involuntary memory, and arcane symbolism - focused attention on the shaping of the individual by the nation and on the potential of the individual, in time of crisis, to redeem the nation.

In Migrant Modernism, J. Dillon Brown examines the intersection between British literary modernism and the foundational West Indian novels that emerged in London after World War II. By emphasizing the location in which anglophone Caribbean writers such as George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, and Samuel Selvon produced and published their work, Brown reveals a dynamic convergence between modernism and postcolonial literature that has often been ignored. Modernist techniques not only provided a way for these writers to mark their difference from the aggressively English, literalist aesthetic that dominated postwar literature in London but also served as a self-critical medium through which to treat themes of nationalism, cultural inheritance, and identity.

The first major study in over three decades to explore the essential arguments of all the major theoretical interpretations of nationalism, from the modernist approaches of Gellner, Nairn, Breuilly, Giddens and Hobsbawm to the alternative paradigms of van den Bergh and Geertz, Armstrong and Smith himself. In a style accessible to the student and the general reader Smith traces the changing view of this hotly discussed topic within the current political, cultural and socioeconomic arena. He also analyses the contributions of such historians, sociologists and political scientists as Seton-Watson, Reynolds, Hastings, Horowitz and Brass. The survey concludes with an analysis of post-modern approaches to national identity, gender and nation, making it indispensable reading to all those interested in gaining full and authoritative knowledge of nationalism.

A Social Theory of the Nation-State construes a novel and original social theory of the nation-state. It rejects nationalistic ways of thinking that take the nation-state for granted as much as globalist orthodoxy that speaks of its current and definitive decline.

Twentieth-century authors were profoundly influenced by changes in the way nations and states governed their citizens. The development of state administrative technologies allowed Western states to identify, track and regulate their populations in unprecedented ways. Patricia E. Chu argues that innovations of form and style developed by Anglo-American modernist writers chart anxieties about personal freedom in the face of increasing governmental controls. Chu examines a diverse set of texts and films, including works by T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston and others, to explore how modernists perceived their work and their identities in relation to state power. Additionally, she sheds light on modernists' ideas about race, colonialism and the postcolonial, as race came increasingly to be seen as a political and governmental construct. This book offers a powerful critique of key themes for scholars of modernism, American literature and twentieth-century literature.